Published October 22, 2026
When a factory closes its doors, a construction crew changes its workers, or a local business hires foreign-born workers, an old and familiar fear usually rises to the surface: "Are immigrants stealing our jobs?"
It is an understandable concern. If you look at jobs like slices of a single pie, it seems obvious that giving one slice to a newcomer means there is less food left on the plate for everyone else. If an immigrant gets a job, does that mean an American worker goes without one?
Economists have spent decades studying this exact question. What they have found across hundreds of studies is that the economy is not a fixed pie. Instead, it is more like an oven that bakes new pies as more people enter the kitchen. When new people arrive and work, they buy groceries, rent homes, and pay for services, which creates even more jobs for others.
To answer whether immigrants take jobs, we have to look closely at the facts. We must understand how labor markets work, look at the differences between legal and undocumented workers, examine whether open jobs would ever be filled without foreign-born help, and explore how immigrants start new businesses. Finally, we will compare two completely different futures for the American economy to see what our policy choices would actually do to American workers.
The belief that immigrants take jobs away from native-born citizens is based on a famous mistake called the "lump of labor fallacy." This is the incorrect idea that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. If that idea were true, then any increase in the population—whether from immigration or simply from people having babies—would cause massive unemployment.
In reality, immigrants do not just supply labor; they also consume goods and services:
Beyond spending money, immigrants rarely compete directly for the exact same jobs as native-born workers. Economists call this complementarity. In simple terms, this means immigrant workers and native-born workers have different skills that work together like puzzle pieces, rather than knocking each other out of the way.
Undocumented workers make up about 4 to 5 percent of the total American workforce. Because many do not speak fluent English and lack formal legal papers, they are concentrated in physical, manual occupations. They work in agriculture, residential construction, dishwashing, commercial cleaning, meatpacking, and landscaping. Most native-born Americans have at least a high school diploma and gravitate toward jobs that require English fluency, customer service skills, computer literacy, or state licenses.
Legal immigrants come through several pathways, including family sponsorship, refugee programs, and skilled work visas like the H-1B program. Skilled legal immigrants frequently work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields), as well as healthcare. When a hospital hires a foreign-born doctor, or a software company hires a specialized computer engineer, that business can expand its services. That growth creates downstream jobs for native-born nurses, office managers, marketing specialists, and administrative assistants.
A common question is: "If employers simply raised their pay, wouldn't native-born Americans take those jobs?"
While higher pay can attract workers in some fields, real-world experiments show that native-born workers almost never step into low-skill, physically punishing roles in large numbers, even when wages go up.
Agriculture provides the clearest proof. Harvesting crops requires intense manual labor under extreme heat, working on your knees or bent over for ten to twelve hours a day, and moving from farm to farm as seasons change. During the early 2010s, states like Georgia and Alabama passed aggressive laws designed to push unauthorized immigrants out of their borders.
The results were immediate and costly:
When an employer cannot find workers for entry-level tasks, the entire business slows down. Consider a home construction company:
Immigrants are not just workers seeking a paycheck. They are also among the most active business owners in the United States.
A major study by researchers at MIT, Northwestern University, and the Wharton School examined millions of American businesses. They discovered that foreign-born residents are 80 percent more likely to start a company than native-born citizens. While immigrants make up about 15 percent of the total population, they create a disproportionately large share of American businesses.
Immigrants have founded or co-founded over 40 percent of the companies on the Fortune 500 list, including iconic companies like Google, Tesla, eBay, and Pfizer. In addition, foreign-born inventors account for roughly one out of every four commercial patents filed in the United States.
By starting businesses, immigrants create payrolls that employ millions of American citizens every single day. They are not taking jobs; they are making jobs.
To understand how immigration policy affects everyday Americans, we can compare two different policy choices.
In World A, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) successfully prevents all undocumented immigration and deports all unauthorized workers. Only native-born citizens and the small number of people already approved through current, slow legal channels remain.
In World B, Congress updates America's immigration system. Work visas are expanded to match real market demand for both high-skilled and lower-skilled jobs. Undocumented workers already living here can earn lawful status, pay a fine, and work openly. Legal channels become fast and fair, making illegal border crossings pointless for all except criminals.
Do immigrants steal our jobs? The clear economic answer is no.
The idea that there is a set number of jobs in a country is an economic myth. Immigrants do not simply take jobs; they fill critical labor shortages that keep entire industries alive, they buy goods and services that keep local stores open, and they launch businesses that employ millions of American workers.
Shutting down immigration shrinks the economy, drives up living costs, and hurts native-born workers by cutting off the base of the economic ladder. In contrast, opening reliable, legal, and orderly avenues for foreign-born workers strengthens wages, increases tax revenue, and expands economic opportunity for everyone.
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